Recently, a local reporter asked me if No Child Left Behind did more good than bad. I was sitting at my desk with a reporting folder for our district’s upcoming NCLB audit. We had already spent countless hours putting together data to illustrate our decisions. In fact, we hired a consultant to strategize ways to “make the grade” with the
What is an exhibition? This issue of Horace features reflection, analysis, critique, description, and arguments from six Essential school educators. Their work provides compelling examples of how diverse schools—elementary and secondary, rural and urban, public, charter, and independent—employ exhibitions for four key purposes: to ensure engagement among students, staff, and the larger community to assess student learning and, therefore, school
by Joseph P. McDonald, originally published in 1992 by the Coalition of Essential Schools The CES Exhibitions Project of the early 1990s produced a range of work that continues to inform the practice of using exhibitions as a “360 degree” method of transforming teaching and learning, community connections, school design, and assessment. Among that work was this paper coupling the
Imagine a classroom of constructive chaos: a group of students is busy as they monitor their work. Another team of students is on the other side of the room redesigning their experiment. They seem frustrated, but are motivated to make their third trial work. In another corner, a student is explaining an article to his research partners that can really
Schools Francis W. Parker Charter Essential School 49 Antietam Street Devens, Massachusetts 01434 phone: 978.772.3293 www.parker.org Greenfield Center School 71 Montague City Road Greenfield, Massachusetts 01301 phone: 413.773.1700 www.centerschool.net Leadership High School 400 Mansell Street, Suite 136 San Francisco, California 94134 phone: 415.841.8910 www.leadershiphigh.org Mission Hill School 67 Alleghany Street Boston, Massachusetts 02120 phone: 617.635.6384 www.missionhillschool.org School of the Future
Join the Coalition of Essential Schools in a nation-wide campaign to promote and celebrate exhibitions as a preferred form of student assessment. CES National has designated the month of May as “National Exhibition Month.” Essential schools and support organizations are urged to participate in activities that make their exhibition work public. National Exhibition Month is an annual campaign, launched in
From the CES Common Principles: Students should have opportunities to exhibit their expertise before family and community. The diploma should be awarded upon a successful final demonstration of mastery for graduation—an “Exhibition.” The school should honor diversity and build on the strength of its communities, deliberately and explicitly challenging all forms of inequity. An “Exhibition” is a demonstration of mastery
Greenfield Center School (GCS) students have a long history of engaging in meaningful projects as the culmination of their studies. Once students have completed these projects, they own their learning; they understand it deeply and can explain how it relates to themselves as well as to their community. In addition, we believe that these presentations raise standards. Projects are presented
And Still We Rise: The Trials and Triumphs of Twelve Gifted Inner-City Students by Miles Corwin (Harper Perennial, 432 pages, $14.00) Miles Corwin was moved to write And Still We Rise when he heard about a 15 year old boy splayed out on a South-Central Los Angeles street corner with several gunshot wounds. The boy had no identification other than
Making Art Together: How Collaborative Art-Making Can Transform Kids, Classrooms, and Communities by Mark Cooper and Lisa Sjostrom (Beacon Press, 208 pages, $26.95) As a senior at Quest High School in Humble, Texas, my final exhibition was on the arts and education. While my presentation was geared towards policy and finance, research on how art programs help kids develop and
Reclaiming Assessment: A Better Alternative to the Accountability Agenda by Chris W. Gallagher (Heniemann, 160 pages, $18.50) Reclaiming Assessment: A Better Alternative to the Accountability Agenda argues that centralized accountability mandates have stifled local schools from designing context-appropriate assessments for their own students. The “Nebraska Story,” the centerpiece of Chris Gallagher’s provocative book, offers a portrait of one state’s decision
Widening the Circle: The Power of Inclusive Classrooms by Mara Sapon-Shevin, (Beacon, 184 pages, $16.00) Widening the Circle argues that all learners—and teachers—contain multitudes. On that basis, inclusion of all students is fundamentally equitable, educationally beneficial, and morally imperative. Inclusion reinforces our democratic commitments, commitments that Essential schools in particular are poised to make or have made already. Fundamentally, an
If equitable achievement is our goal, we must have authentic assessments that are reflective of our community’s expectations and meaningful to our students and to us. Such assessments require a systemic commitment from which we start with our school’s mission and plan backwards to support and rethink curriculum, structures, support systems, tools, and day-to-day decisions. We need to be prepared
In January 2007, longtime CES educator Lisa Hirsch interviewed Linda Darling-Hammond, the Charles E. Ducommun Professor of Education at Stanford University, where she launched the Stanford Educational Leadership Institute and the School Redesign Network. Darling-Hammond talked with Hirsch immediately after returning from testifying to a congressional committee about No Child Left Behind’s upcoming reauthorization, and suggested that Essential school educators
FairTest The National Center for Fair and Open Testing (FairTest) is among the nation’s leading opponents of high stakes standardized testing and its current (mis)use. In addition to leading the charge to influence local, state, and national policy to support more humane and educationally sound environments for teaching and learning, FairTest also features documentation of alternatives to high-stakes testing, mostly
CES has identified four phases of exhibitions implementation among Essential schools. The schools represented in this issue of Horace are implementing exhibitions systemically; their stories provide insight into their efforts to construct and continuously improve exhibitions as a “final product” and a whole-school process. Beginning Implementation Student learning is regularly assessed at the school, but exhibitions as an authentic assessment